Some in Silicon Valley aren’t quite sure what to make of SoftBank and its massive, roughly $100 billion Vision Fund. At times, they say privately, it looks like a drunken gunslinger, firing off massive checks in quick succession. But sources close to SoftBank say there is a method to its madness. Read More
Recursion, a drug discovery startup out of Salt Lake City, Utah has announced a $60 million Series B round, led by Data Collective (DCVC). Recursion started out in 2014 on a mission to identify 100 new treatments in 10 years. That’s a lofty goal, considering the discovery for just one drug can traditionally take decades and tens of millions of dollars, with a high rate of failure… Read More
Is this the new semi truck Tesla is set to unveil at the end of this month? The truck, posted to Reddit (then deleted, then re-posted) bears more than a passing resemblance to the image shared in a teaser released by the automaker itself (via The Verge). The sleek angled front also looks like something you’d expect to be electrically powered, if that makes any sense. You can compare… Read More
Few people thought that a simple site which allowed teachers to create quizzes for their classes online would get this far, but Kahoot has been a smash hit since it launched. Only a few months after Kahoot closed a $20 million funding round, with Microsoft Ventures participating, it’s now pressing the revenue button by launching a new premium version of the service. Kahoot Plus will be… Read More
Online commerce giant Shopify is ready for its Instagram moment: The one-stop shop platform provider is opening up its Instagram integration to thousands of its merchants leading up to the holiday season. The platform expansion adds yet another sales channel to the considerable quiver Shopify providers sellers, which includes Facebook, Messenger, Buzzfeed and others, too.
Instagram’s… Read More
MessageBird, a cloud communications platform that counts publicly listed Twilio as a competitor, has raised a hefty $60 million in Series A funding. The round is being led by Accel in the U.S., with Atomico, the VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, leading in Europe. Read More
The recent Equifax hack is yet another reminder that major corporations are still leaving themselves susceptible to attacks. There are countless cybersecurity startups looking to fix this problem, but HYPR believes its decentralization approach is key. Its authentication technology secures traditional passwords and also biometrics like fingerprints, faces and voices. Read More
Frame.io, the collaboration platform for the video industry, has today announced the close of a $20 million Series B funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from existing investors including Accel Partners, SignalFire and Shasta Ventures. Frame.io launched on to the scene back in March of 2015. The company solved a growing problem with a seemingly obvious solution. People… Read More
Platform9‘s new Fission Workflows brings together all the buzzwords you love: Kubernetes, Docker containers and serverless computing. In many ways, it’s the logical next step for these technologies. Fission itself is Platform9’s open source serverless computing platform that runs on top of the Kubernetes container orchestration service. In its early days, serverless… Read More
The games library for the Nintendo Switch is already great, but it keeps getting better: Farming simulator Stardew Valley is coming to the hybrid portable console on October 5, which is just a couple of short days away. The indie title received accolades when it debuted on the PC, and now it’s going to be a portable title available for just $14.99, which sounds like a pretty great deal.… Read More
Chipmaker Intel wants a piece of the growing Internet of Things market and they have developed the Intel Secure Device solution to help companies provision IoT devices in a secure and automated way.
Dipti Vachani, vice president and general manager for the Internet of Things Group at Intel, says we hear that 50 billion IoT devices will be deployed by 2020, but there is a gap between that… Read More
Facebook has bought itself a little more time over a major legal challenge in Europe after the Irish High Court decided not to strike down a b2b mechanism it uses to transfer user data to the U.S. for processing. Read More
Nura’s come a long way since last June. Back when the hardware company last stopped by our offices, its headphones were giant, like a pair of old library headphones recreated on a 3D printer. Their innards were splayed out next to them in a separate control box. It seemed impossible that the company would be able to fit all of that into a reasonably sized set of cans. Last month,… Read More
AtScale, a four-year old startup that helps companies get a big-picture view of their big data inside their BI tools, announced a $25 million Series C investment today. The round was led by Atlantic Bridge with participation from new investors Wells Fargo and Industry Ventures along with returning investors Storm Ventures, UMC, Comcast and XSeed Capital. With today’s investment, the… Read More
Boxee co-founder Idan Cohen’s most recent stint may have been in the smart TV space — but now he wants to build a box that’ll help you grow some lettuce outside your home. That might seem weird, but after many dinners spent feeding guests with vegetables grown from his roof, he and his team are now launching a smart planter called GROW. Initially starting as a hobby to… Read More
What do N26, Revolut and Monzo have in common? The three founders of those three startups are all coming to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to discuss all things fintech. If you want to see Valentin Stalf, Nikolay Storonsky and Tom Blomfield share the same stage, come to Disrupt in December. N26 also happens to be a Startup Battlefield success story. The company participated in our startup… Read More
From travel visas to sponsoring green cards, today’s companies deal with a lot of documents to keep up with the demands of a global workforce. A Chicago-based startup called Envoy Global has built enterprise software for processing the relevant paperwork. It also works with a law firm to offer companies legal advice pertaining to immigration and visas. Envoy Global has raised a $21… Read More
In its ongoing war against online extremism the UK government has said it intends to change the law to bring in tougher sentences for people who repeat view terrorist content online — increasing the maximum penalty to up to 15 years behind bars. Read More
Curiscope, a U.K. augmented and virtual reality content startup, has raised a $1 million seed round led by LocalGlobe, the seed VC firm founded by Saul and Robin Klein. Ascension Ventures, Force over Mass, ustwo Adventure, and Richard Fearn also participated. Read More
Last year, a new VC emerged in Silicon Valley, designed to deal with the world’s biggest problems. 50 Years said it wanted to solve real-world problems, while at the same time as making money. What if you took that ethos and created a sort of Y Combinator-for-good? Today London, seems to be poised to catch up with that idea, with the launch of Zinc, a new ‘company builder’… Read More
